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IC

Serena Chopra

Serena Chopra is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Denver. She is the author of This Human (Coconut Books, 2013) and the chapbooks, Penumbra (Flying Guillotine Press, 2011) and Livid Season (Free Poetry, 2012). She is a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar, working on a novel informed by her research with Maya For Women, a queer women’s support organization in Bangalore, India. She is a multidisciplinary artist, working as a professional modern dancer and five year company member with Evolving Doors Dance, as well as a visual artist, serving as a 2011-2013 resident artist at the RedLine Gallery in Denver. She is a co-founder and actor in the poet’s theater group, GASP, and she recently worked with Splintered Light Theater on a shadow/light production of Ic, for which she composed the soundscape. Her ongoing text/image collaboration, Memory is a Future Tense, with artist Lu Cong, can be found at memoryis.net. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. She lives and works in Denver. SerenaChopra.com

Sueyeun Juliette Lee says of IC by Serena Chopra:

Serena Chopra’s Ic mourns our difficult inheritances and longs after a soaring union with our greatest desires. In her text, “Ic” is a discarded Icarus, adrift among the waves and re-identified as flotsam or jetsam for divers to collect. She recounts Icarus’ tale as a denunciation of a world that gives us wings while demanding that we limit our skies. Chopra acknowledges that this ”Ic” is recognizable to so many of us, whose talents, dreams, and gifts have been pulled down by limiting social histories. In this world, gravity is a “vertical conspiracy.” Yet “Ic” is also a body of possibility: “Ic” is a suffix adrift, free from the words it once modified. Ic bobs and melts into a sonic celebration, demonstrating how illegibility can transform into fluid alterities. Ic cries out to us all–with a full throat that syncopatedly gasps and gives lyric flight.

Stephanie Anderson is also the author of In the Key of Those Who Can No Longer Organize Their Environments (Horse Less Press) and If You Love Error So Love Zero (forthcoming, Trembling Pillow Press), as well as several chapbooks. She lives in Beijing, where she is a member of the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows at the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures, Tsinghua University.

Lands of Yield is a dated “poemlogue,” transcribing Tokyo’s fantastic sensorium via rigid syllabics and mutating form. In dialogue with Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Bernadette Mayer’s early durational works, and various diaries, the text also forays into other geographies and temporalities. “What use are these measured clues?” Anderson asks. What’s worth putting down, when the documentation is too voluminous to match up to memory? “Did I mention the mottled windows?” “Who is the document’s intended recipient?” “What are you reading now?” “Did I ask it in a dream?” “What would the clear material be?”

Tim Earley is the author of three previous collections of poems, Boondoggle (Main Street Rag, 2005), The Spooking of Mavens (Cracked Slab Books, 2010), and POEMS DESCRIPTIVE OF RURAL LIFE AND SCENERY (Horse Less Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters poetry award. LINTHEAD STOMP (Horse Less Press, 2016) is his fourth collection. He lives in Denver, Colorado with his partner, the poet Jessica Comola, and teaches online classes in literature and creative writing for the University of Mississippi.

“A viscous larynx, dipped in honey and snake shed, singing, images elucidated by the poverty-objects they juxtapose, a smutty sainthood magic revival tent Psalm: LintheadStomp sends out lines (but I wanted to write vines) that can hardly contain their surging, vibratory syntactical collisions; here is a language that offers all the innards and the heaving, too. LintheadStomp is a mercy, and not for the faint of heart. Tim Earley is a poet of the American South that I have been waiting to read my entire life.”–Selah Saterstrom. author of Slab and The Meat and Spirit Plan

“Tim Earley is a rascal. And a Roscoe. He levitates beside the great American luminaries. His poetry is fire. And built of the water-giving stone. If folks are not reading Earley centuries from now then they will be a people without eyes. And hearts. For those of you who have been with Earley all along, you will recognize in this collection a culmination. Prophet Earley has always been about bringing rarefied intellect into the gristly grrr of the body. This book takes that intent to epic peaks. New to the Earley dawn and midnight song? I offer your tomorrows to you: you will tousle and dogear this; you will damage it via your love for it; you will clutch it to your ribs and nose; you will stand far too close to a friend; you will lend this Earley; and in lending this; press hard; leave marks. The greats do what? Sear and save. It’s time for Tim Earley to appear in the OED: you are wounded where you heal and healed where you are wounded Amen amen AMEN.”–Abraham Smith, author of Hank and Ashagalomancy

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer based in New York and Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in Fence, BOMB, The Third Rail, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Currently, Lara teaches poetry at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and works as a contributing editor for Triple Canopy. She was born in the Bronx.

“The strange and compelling beauty of The Somnambulist lies in its ‘savvy circumlocution’ of multiple stories in language that the poet herself alternately embraces and fears, loves and reviles. ‘If I look for language to find you, if I let it, language finds me everywhere,’ she writes, and the line is as much of a promise as a threat. The Somnambulist tells, in fragmented parts, the story of the poet’s hustler uncle alongside her own story of becoming a poet. This is a new kind of writer’s memoir—or true crime story, or coming-of- age narrative, or family autobiography—one that navigates the tricky territory of multiple sub-genres with extraordinary skill, sly wit, and subversive splendor.” -Laura Sims

“The Somnambulist, a no-holds- barred monodrama, jolts the reader awake. Lara Mimosa Montes is a startling and powerful poet, who opts for vertigo, and whose greatest virtue may be her ability to perform flamboyantly while abstaining from histrionics—to recuse herself, with the exercise of a triumphant minimalism, from her own virtuoso spotlight. Braiding together numbness and desire, she brilliantly demonstrates, in the close-miked fashion of a cabaret Maurice Blanchot, the weirdness of being a witness, a quietly divulging voice.” — Wayne Koestenbaum

Kate Schapira is the author of four other books of poetry: The Soft Place (also with Horse Less Press), How We Saved the City (Stockport Flats), The Bounty: Four Addresses (Noemi Press) and TOWN (Factory School/Heretical Texts). Her 11th chapbook, Someone Is Here, appeared in 2015 from Projective Industries. She lives in Providence, RI, where she teaches at Brown University and for Frequency Writers, runs the Publicly Complex Reading Series, and sometimes offers Climate Anxiety Counseling.

Of Schapira’s Handbook for Hands…, Lo Kwa Mei-En writes, “What have I given in the service of systemic denial? And what strange growth might I undergo if I choose to maintain, instead, an awareness of reality, with its fractured, fractal manifestations like spores in every mouthful of breath, of food, of outcry? “Have we seen us?” These are some of the questions Kate Schapira asks with Handbook for Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out, a collection of poems whose speakers alternately call us towards the dream witch city (a poetic system of grief and resistance) and instruct us to confront and name the plastic-woven roots amassed beneath the throbbing spread of human civilization. Schapira’s poems insistently reflect the terms of power back to the sky, back to the dead—who demand of us, “While you have them, adjust your eyes”—back to the reader, with angular, physical verse that builds up a cerebral, critical mass of conflict and feeling. This book situated me as a reader in the nexus of “feeling like something living off light and death, not life” and “growing the moment.” I am grateful for how these poems inhabit strange, new ways of being in a painfully familiar world.”

Phil Estes’s chapbooks are Gem City/Fountain City, Children of Reagan (both from Rabbit Catastrophe), and Slowjams (Living Arts). His work has appeared in Action Yes, Diagram, Lungfull, West Wind Review, Willow Springs, and others. He lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, and teaches writing at Louisiana Tech.

Of HIGH LIFE, Johannes Goransson writes,

“I am on dead songbird patrol…” PhilEstes’s poems start out as slacker jokes but then they go wrong. Sometimes they go so wrong that they become frightening and politically charged or become beautiful meditations on art. Or do both at the same time. “Mmm-hmm” has never sounded as prophetic and poetic as in these snippets from a scary-funny middle america. Lets call him the Mallarme of the Strip Mall.

Jessica Comola is from Austin, Texas. She has an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is currently working towards a PhD from the University of Denver. Evie Shockley says of this book, “Jessica Comola’s debut collection marks her as a poet for whom language is stranger than truth. Her ear tells her things the eye cannot perceive, and she shares those rarely heard cadences with us.”

“A funny, mournful contempo apocalypse-narrative-Ezekialesque, lightly; fast-morphing Rimbaudian prose, spangly; Celanian neologisms, cast conversationally. These poems are fancy, not in an imagination-on-the-cheap sense but in an astral-observatory-at-the-online-mall sense: Comola’s “I” is an avatar in an infinite game riven with glitches and challenges, where our world’s data-driven imperatives are reflected in cosmic-funhouse style. This book is huge, brainiac fun, and it reads dizzyingly fast.”—Catherine Wagner

“Following in a long line of acts of piracy by women writers (Kathy Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates), Kristi Maxwell proves herself a masterful ventriloquist. Slipping her hand into through a card game (Royalty), a children’s book, historical documents on sea pirates, and Treasure Island, Maxwell speaks, strikes, through double entendres, puns, homonyms, and jokes—all the devices scorned by the “original” pirates of linguistic, cultural and political power. Plan/k—not only Dickinson’s plank but also Maxwell’s (and Kafka’s) plan K (plans A-J always go awry)– engenders alternate subtexts , defrock priests and denude emperors: “[‘where are your manners’ ‘where are your manners’ ‘inflected’ ‘infected’ ‘affected’]) but reads as a He by her mother’s (Design / Deceit [by her knowing the Signs by which a Pete is Mister-ed and Sir-ed (Served vs. Serfed)]).]” Meaning radiates in all directions , refusing and submitting to the lure of narrative, the drive to annex: ““Frontier Thesis[:] […] Turner’s funda(men)tal orientation [turner] to the land.” Though Maxwell sets sail with the infamous pirate(ss) Mary Read, Plan/K is less a “whole lotion to cross” than perpetual Brownian motion in the Petri dish of culture, a nervous twitching of semantic, syntactical and grammatical categories. It is also a book sounding the bottoms: “’Gen-Hur on a cherry-it a char[ge]iot (c [as see]-h[e]r-riot!) Mary Read, the woman compelled by her mother to deceive in order to live: ‘[Mary Read has no Reed (read: Penis; read: Man-Oar).” Oar-less, Maxwell takes a leap–is pushed from the plan/k. And adventure begins.”

There’s a beautiful epigraph that invites us into The Jitters: “… am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” The jitters, the junk, the pain, the fortitude to remain here as “anew creature /… brave enough / to be wounded.” Anne Cecelia Holmes has the courage to say carefully, and measure shrewdly; to sing sadly, and sing boldly. To paraphrase her: hold your breath, read this book. Her poems don’t flinch or back away from our darkest thoughts. —Dara Wier

Anne Cecelia Holmes’ The Jitters constructs an “I” that wobbles between a dangerous and endangered outer world and an estrangement from its own interior, seeking to rebuild a past it can barely recall via maps it has forgotten how to read. In clean, ritualistic sentences that “travel by assembly line,” the speaker announces the security breach. This is an American “I” in the era of terror, breaking it down in a tone whose wit is born of trauma and whose metaphors, like lost children, seek signification. This collection is pitch-perfect, a sustained masterpiece of alienation and hunger. —Diane Seuss

In my father’s house are many mansions,” Jesus promised. In her deftly-aimed, disarmingly poised debut, Nikki Wallschlaeger leads us phrase by phrase through the many dim and brightly lit houses of our American psyche in this pitiless new century: “Hospitals. Lighted for end times. They run on glossy generators & backup generators, lights of all dreams.” Her long lines push the phrases into tight proximities which are sometimes painful, sometimes grate up a little spark: “Neighbor, our hearts pumped blood in the same room, looking onto lakes that teenagers drown in.” I admire the grave persistence of her vision, the precision of her eye and ear. Houses unflinchingly reports the extremity of contemporary existence and presents the “end times” as durational, as just something else to endure. “The bill, they say, is going through the house. Eventually we’ll have to get real. -Joyelle McSweeney

Nikki Wallschlaeger is not afraid to watch the furniture break down like a body and then come together against a brick wall, someone or something pounding on the other side. If origin is a myth, it is also endless practice: “There’s always a big knife in the kitchen.” “We’re using the past instead of letting it use us.” As white civilization drags its history of ruin and pillage into the 21st century, Houses rebuilds ancestry as force rather than simply loss, wielding the eye of vulnerability buried inside each scar through a face-off with the present: “They’re vague about what they want with their violence so I shot them.” This is not a book you will supervise. This is a book whose supervision pierces the mundane and extraordinary, transforming dispossession into wanderlust, mending the spell of ill inheritance. –Lucas de Lima

I hear the old folk tune here, again and again, the lullaby Jack Spicer threaded throughout “Fifteen False Propositions Against God,” the mockingbird, diamond ring., the absent savior. In Here You Are, again, Mama’s objects endlessly threatening to disappoint, even as new, better objects appear to staunch baby’s tears. Like the phrases from the news that fall, like leaves, into the mulch of the poem, e.g the “binders full of women” of Mitt Romney ’12.

Peck and Joseph use word and line as counters—colorful steps with which to raise the reader (the dreamer) a gorgeous house of cards. “God right here still nothing on top of everything/ to be in all this beauty.” Joseph and Peck’s personae start out strong and united, like siblings, but as the book wears on, propinquity seems to play on nerves, and out of sheer anxiety the poem begins to throw itself back onto its own beach, the waves like iterations of rain and sun,” “pink,” “home,” “garden”; the poets Hiromi Ito and Mark Zuckerberg each make an appearance—it’s a theophany, a book of rite, and all who come and linger here, even for a moment, shall experience the rhapsodomancy of the adept. –Kevin Killian

Composed through the accumulation and solve of discrete interwoven series, EVERY LIVING ONE attends to presence rent by attachment and loss—creation entrusted to itself, further bewildered by text(s) and belief. It picks through the razor briar of “born-again” religious rhetoric and junks the abstraction of transcendentalism to embrace visionary experience, cleaving to practice grounded in relinquishment and acts of salvage that accompany the transformative threshold of edges.

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“What if the secret heart of rural America were a still waiting, an all-but-silent psalm? These lyrics are delicate, involuted fossils of a trance-like attention that somehow does not exclude chronic underemployment, neighbors up on assault charges, and other vicissitudes of contemporary rural living. In the tradition of C.D. Wright, besmilr brigham, and perhaps Lorine Niedecker above all, these are poems ‘learning the mirror and field guide,’ becoming ‘a process of mapping’—not just of place, but also of being-in-place, an angled consciousness that pares itself away even as the lines all but dissolve on the reader’s sympathetic eye-tongue.” —G.C. Waldrep

“Sara is a lyrical spirit that is one part child, one part poet, and all visionary. Sara Woods’ concise, delightful prose moves quickly yet resonates, like a fire that catches fast and smolders for a long time. Like some kind of reincarnated American Henri Michaux, Woods manages to make these prose poems both hilariously absurd and devastatingly sincere.” – Nathan Hoks

“With these beautiful, small, heroic bites, we can ingest, if only for a little while, what makes us good, what makes us human.” -Gale Marie Thompson

“Sara’s father is a wolf. Her dog is a miracle. These little poem stories are feral in content but meticulous in construction. They are little miracles adding up to the sum of a beautiful storybook.” -Dena Rash Guzman

Sara Woods is a transgender poet and author of two books of poetry, Sara or the Existence of Fire (Horse Less Press, Fall 2014) and Wolf Doctors (Artifice Books, Spring 2014). She spends her time doing visual art, graphic design and singing “Landslide” at karaoke nights across Portland, OR, where she lives. She is also the co-author, with Carrie Lorig, of the chapbooks stonepoems (Solar Luxuriance, 2014) and rootpoems (Radioactive Moat, 2013) and co-edits the print literary magazine Skydeer Helpking with Jeannette Gomes. Her poetry and collaborations are published or forthcoming in Salt Hill, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Diagram, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere. http://moonbears.biz

Weaving together the half-lives of familial, personal, cultural and ecological histories, Sediment & Veilinvestigates landscape, memory and inheritance to trouble the power structures and violences that both mediate these relationships and inscribe themselves into our DNA in the process. Sediment & Veil is an incantation that moves through the debris of these institutions in order to be located by the generative reshuffling and reassembling of their narrative pieces.

Kirsten Jorgenson is from Salt Lake City, Utah, via Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, Sediment & Veil, which is forthcoming from Horse Less Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Deseret (Horse Less Press, 2011) and Accidents of Distance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and coauthor of the poetics chapbook Country Music (DoubleCross Press, 2013). She lives in Western North Carolina with her son, dog, and partner, Nathan Hauke, with whom she coedits Ark Press and cocurates the Ark Press Summer Reading Series.

Written in a seance of intuition and then extensively revised, Something in the way is an aboriginal blues, a gut map, where ecstatic clarity shares a bed with gall stone blindness. Proceeding by feints and jabs, deadpan misdirection undercutting stark confession, the pages share a core vulnerability, a magnetic bruise. These are loner’s poems, vying to connect. Sunk deep in the mud of childhood, dragged by an erotic comb with missing teeth, what passes through unexamined, re-emerges in adulthood, wearing masks. Surreal, streetwise, and draped in black humor, the method is magpie, the code collapsed romantic. Duvernoy’s piercing lyric rhythm, his art brut cologne, haunt a landscape poised between complicity and the drifter’s escape. For readers hungry for a sound of authentic risk and mystery, this electric debut will quicken the pulse.

John Duvernoy was raised in the hills of Central New York. He is the author of the chapbook Razor Love (Unlock the Clockcase).

Pattie McCarthy is the author of four previous books— Marybones, Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Verso, and bk of (h)rs— and several chapbooks, most recently scenes from the lives of my parents and x y z &&. A former Pew Fellow in the Arts, she teaches at Temple University.

In Pattie McCarthy’s wonderful new collection, Nulls, we are compelled to consider a collage of possible meetings which ultimately lead to birth— the birth of the poem, the birth of assumption, the birth of identity, and the birth of expectations and restraints which press upon any person with the aspiration to decode domestic entropy and to deftly shepherd living form. With urgency you will be asked, WHO SAYS THAT WOLVES ARE BAD MOTHERS?” and “DO YOU HAVE YOUR EXHAUSTION LETTER?” McCarthy’s asking is hypnotic, acute and probes discrete categories of collapse. Nulls beautifully demonstrates how iteration can become palimpsest, how “invisible ink” may “make your mouth noun” and how interrogation can cause fracture. Nulls provides proof that texts can change the dimensions of mental space and transmute or reveal the inaudible which exists alongside any transcription. –Laynie Browne

Tim Earley is the author of two previous full-length collections, Boondoggle (Main Street Rag, 2005) and The Spooking of Mavens (Cracked Slab Books, 2010), along with a limited edition chapbook, Catfish Poems (Delete Press, 2013). His work has appeared in The Ecopoetry Anthology, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, Cannibal, Bestoned: The New Metaphysick, Conduit, and many other publications. He teaches for the University of Mississippi and the Fine Arts Work Center’s Online Writing Program, 24PearlStreet, and lives in Glenville, West Virginia.

Kristin Abraham was born and raised in Michigan. She currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her husband, three dogs, and two cats. She teaches English at a community college in Wyoming and serves as editor-in-chief and poetry editor for the literary journal Spittoon (www.spittoonmag.com).

Daniela Olszewska is the author of three collections of poetry: cloudfang : : cakedirt (horse less press, 2012), Citizen J (Artifice Books, forthcoming), and How to Feel Confident with Your Special Talents (co-written with Carol Guess) (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming). She sits on Switchback Books’ Board of Directors and serves as Associate Poetry Editor of H_NGM_N. Daniela teaches creative writing in conjunction with The Alabama Prison Arts & Education Project. She now lives and writes under the name Daniela Czarny

Kate Schapira is the author of The Soft Place (horse less press, 2012), How We Saved the City (Stockport Flats, 2012), The Bounty: Four Addresses (Noemi Press, 2011), TOWN (Factory School, 2010) and several chapbooks from Flying Guillotine Press, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Cy Gist Press, Rope- A-Dope Press and horse less press. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she co- curates the Publicly Complex Reading Series and writes, teaches, and works as a Writer in the Schools.

Susan Scarlata’s essays, poetry and reviews have appeared in Conduit, The Denver Quarterly, Fence, The Horse Less Review, Typo and are forthcoming in 1913. Scarlata is the author of the chapbook, Lit Instant published by Parcel Press. She has designed and taught courses at Universities, held residencies, and led writing workshops for students of all ages as well as teachers. Scarlata received her PhD from The University of Denver where she also taught and developed writing courses that integrated service into the writing curriculum.

Susan taught at and holds an MFA from Brown University. She is the Executive Editor of Lost Roads Publishers, an independent literary press, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s newest campus in Hong Kong.

Order your copy of It Might Turn Out We Are Real from Lulu, SPD, or Amazon.

FABRIC: Preludes to the Last American Book
Richard Froude

Richard Froude was born in London in 1979, grew up in Bristol and came to the US in 2002. New writing can be found in Witness, Birkensnake, and Slacklust. With Anne Waldman and Erik Anderson, he compiles and edits the mail-art journal Thuggery & Grace. An associate of the Arts & Humanities in Healthcare Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, he works with palliative care patients at UC hospital. He lives in Denver with his wife, Rohini.

[…] sugar, sprinkles, and glitter. These experiments resulted in her latest chapbook Essay on Parts of Day (Horseless Press) – a really stunning collection that will cause something to bloom inside […]